


You're Just a Guy, Right?

by MycroftRH



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: FTM!Foggy, FTM!Matt, Gen, Pre-Slash If You Squint, Trans Character, Trans Male Character, but less than in canon probably, contains what we used to call, transfic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-04-24
Updated: 2016-05-31
Packaged: 2018-03-25 13:46:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3812728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MycroftRH/pseuds/MycroftRH
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Foggy was terrified to have a roommate, until he met Matt.  (Foggy and Matt are both trans men, and it's kind of perfect.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Columbia put them together because they weren’t quite sure what else to do with them. They were in a girls’ building, but the bathroom was just theirs. The other room that would have had people sharing it was empty.

Foggy had been terrified about living in a shared dorm room. He didn’t know if it would be worse if he were stuck with a girl or a boy. Either way, he hadn’t known what the hell he’d do at night. There was no way he would go without anything binding his chest at all in front of a stranger, and he knew perfectly well that he couldn’t just keep binding while he slept. He had wild thoughts about staying up every night until his roommate was asleep to take his binding off and then waking up at 5AM to put it back on. Which would be way too long to bind at a time, sleep aside.

And, well, he’d just have to hope to heaven that whoever he ended up with was really, really good with trans people. He could end up anywhere from getting yelled at to molested to murdered in his sleep. He had nightmares about it, the last year or so of high school, that still lasted part of the way into college.

He’d been emailing back and forth with a person who worked at campus housing for weeks when he got the message - “I think I may have found something for you.”

He’d never actually talked to Matt before they met that first day in their room. He couldn’t believe how gorgeous Matt was. Not on T yet, but no one would ever get him wrong, see him as anything other than the playgirl model he was, with that face and body that would continue to draw everyone to him, well, forever. Foggy, on the other hand, still had his ridiculous beard that he’d grown just because he could, and the long hair that he had for, well, basically the same reason. Getting read right no matter what length his hair was was still a new and awesome thing then.

Matt’s voice was carefully trained down low. It was soft, and Foggy’s never been quite sure if that was to make it harder for people to tell how hard he was working to keep it on pitch or because he naturally spoke that way. It made him feel safe, anyway, that voice, soft and gentle. It stayed the same, even after Matt’s voice broke on testosterone, and again he doesn’t know if that was just a habit that stuck or a natural personality thing.

He’s always kind of liked that Matt couldn’t see him. Matt’s only ever heard his voice - only after it was already male-deep. He’s never seen Foggy’s chest, or his hips, or any of the other dozen things that Foggy worried about every day, and sometimes still does. Felt them, because they’ve always been pretty touchy, Matt started holding his arm after only a couple days, but somehow that doesn’t seem the same.

Matt got top surgery a year before Foggy did with money that Foggy never quite learned the provenance of, though he now has vague suspicions involving back alley fighting. It was over the summer break between their second and third years so he wouldn’t miss weeks of class.

The physical restrictions were worse for him than they later were for Foggy. He couldn’t use his stick at all for a couple weeks; too much arm movement. So he stayed at Foggy’s house, with his parents, and yes Foggy still spent his breaks at his parents’ house because there’s no point wasting money that could be going toward your education or your own surgery when there’s a perfectly good house right there.

Foggy kept Matt in bed for a week, brought him everything, only let him up to go to the bathroom. He led him around for two more weeks, even though his arms worked well enough to use his cane after one, and didn’t let him out of his sight for another week after that. Matt had a habit of finding the darndest ways to get himself hurt, and he didn’t need to be allowed a new excuse to do it.

The first time Matt got into bed across the room from him and his pyjamas lay completely flat at the front, Foggy’s pretty sure he was just as happy as Matt was. He went to sleep with a wide grin on his face matching Matt’s, and he knew even then that Matt could tell.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The previous chapter was more on the fluffy side, but this one's definitely more on the angsty side, because Matt. It also has a brief mention of what's probably an eating disorder and behavior that might be edging towards self-harm (though the self-harm's not more than canon, really).

Jack Murdock didn’t mind how his kid wanted to look. Boys’ clothes were cheaper and easier to fit; short hair took a lot less time to take care of. If Mattie liked it, well, that was fine with him. And if Mattie was a bit of a tomboy, why would he care about that, either?

The nuns at St. Agnes did not feel the same way.

The first two weeks, they let him keep wearing his old clothes, wanting to let him have something familiar after his life had changed so completely. Then they tried to get him into the standard dress that all their girls wore.

It was tight in all the wrong places, and it had a tag in the back that scratched his neck so hard it felt like it burned. The shoes they put him in squeezed his toes. The underwear cut in at his waist and the tops of his thighs. He tore it all off, put his own clothes back on, and spent an hour in bed shaking.

They let it be for another few days, then tried again. This time he wouldn’t put any of it on in the first place. They got sharper, threatened punishment, and he started to scream. He didn’t stop screaming until he fell asleep, exhausted.

He could hear them muttering worriedly on the other side of the door. He could hear the other kids crying in their rooms. He could hear every creak at night, couldn’t sleep. He could hear that the muttering on the other side of the door was all about “Matilda”, which wasn’t a name he’d heard since his mother left. It made him feel sick.

He moaned, and writhed, and cried, and sometimes screamed. One day he went into the closet with his blanket, closed the door, wrapped himself in the blanket and lay there completely still staring at the wall for eight hours.

Stick didn’t feel the same way. He liked Mattie more the way he wanted to be. He preferred Mattie in clothes that were easy to move and flip and spin in. Hair could get grabbed. Girls were too weak for his war, so the further Mattie was from that weakness, the better.

Going back to St. Agnes when Stick left was one of the hardest things Mattie had ever done. He considered running away – strongly considered it, planned for it, even collected stuff together in a bag – but then another part of him told him that wasn’t rational, was self-indulgent, and he could take this for just a few more years until he could leave. That part of him had to work hard for it over the years. He never unpacked his bag, refreshed the stuff in it from time to time. Sometimes actually left and had to drag himself back.

He knew how to meditate, now, and that helped. When everything got too much and he could feel himself on the way to screaming or shutting down he shut everything down intentionally. Everyone at St. Agnes got used to seeing his face take on sharp pain and then go completely slack.

They worked out a sort of compromise. Not intentionally, really, but as a natural result of finding a balance between “propriety” and Mattie, well, failing to cooperate. Mattie grew his hair long but didn’t wear the dresses. They still called him Matilda. He still wore boxers, which, admittedly, they may not have known about.

As he got older, his body started changing. Even with his hair short and everything like it had been once (with people who, even if they didn’t understand, at least let him be), he still wouldn’t be able to convince anyone else he wasn’t a girl.

He tried binding his chest with things that he later learned he shouldn’t have. He couldn’t, though, anyway. The pain he could take – the aching ribs, the skin chafing till it bled – but the other things, the little things, the sweat soaking through and dripping down his stomach, the rubbing, the dig into his stomach when he bent over, the scratch against his back – those he couldn’t handle. He compensated with tight sports bras and layers and not eating. He got his weight down low enough that his chest and hips were barely visible at all, and that other thing, the worst thing even though no one else could see it, finally stopped. None of it was something the people at St. Agnes could technically complain about (after he stopped trying to bind, that is, but they hadn’t known about that, or at least he hopes they didn’t).

He got scholarships and financial aid and worked half a dozen jobs and got into college. He left three months early, as soon as his birthday hit, and moved into the dorm, private by coincidence (or a heck of a lot of luck). He cut his hair short, bought all new clothing.

The first two years he asked his teachers, when they called roll the first time, to say Matt instead of Matilda. The third year he emailed them ahead of time. The fourth year he started saving for surgery, and the emails started asking for pronouns as well as his name.

The year after that, he took his 4.0 to Columbia Law, and met someone who would change his life yet again – this time, for the first time, for the better.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So my autistic headcanon of Matt (that's damn near canon, honestly) kind of got in there.
> 
> In case it wasn't clear, his dysphoria kind of set off/reacted with/aggravated his (canonical) sensory issues, thus causing some of the difference between when we see him post-accident with his father and post-accident at St. Agnes.
> 
> I kind of just... ignored Catholic guilt and internalized stuff and so forth this chapter. I may get around to that at some future point.
> 
> If you want to discuss anything herein, or say hi, or like... anything at all, my tumblr's mycroftrh.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If I'd been three days earlier it would have been precisely one year between chapters. Wow. Well, I've seen longer breaks.

Foggy Nelson did not have a Proper Transgender Narrative.

He never complained about being called a girl, never asked to be called a different name, never said he wanted different parts or wanted to grow up to be a man.

Foggy liked dresses. He liked his long hair. He liked pretty things. He liked Barbies. He wasn’t a fan of most dolls, but at one point he got into making clothes for them, which was fun.

He didn’t like puberty. That was… not fun. He’d been perfectly happy with his body before; it didn’t bother him, and just carried him around in the way that bodies are supposed to do. But then puberty came and his body started doing all sorts of things that got in his way. He tried to cross his arms and his chest was in the way. He tried to climb trees and his center of gravity was all off. And, god, once a month, his entire body all ganged up to get in the way of absolutely everything. So puberty wasn’t fun.

He sort of got accustomed to all that, though. He learned a new way to cross his arms, lower down on his chest. He stopped climbing trees. He stopped running, because his body moved around in ways he didn’t like, and he gained weight which was all in places he didn’t like, but that was okay. He could cope. Everyone else did. Half of the human population had their bodies do all these things and they did just fine.

He’d heard of transsexuals, vaguely. He knew they existed. It never occurred to him in the slightest that he might have anything in common with them. Yes, he hated his body, but so did everyone else. (Right? No one could possibly like bodies that were like this, right? All girls must hate their bodies, right? And besides, he was overweight, so he was supposed to not like the way he looked.) He’d never had any sort of “penis envy”, definitely. Yeah, he was a tomboy in some ways, but he was definitely girly in others. He’d only worn makeup maybe once, twice, but he wore dresses all the time.

He never bothered to think through that all that, though, because it never came up on his radar that he might want to.

He knew he was bi. (Like, super bi.) So his first year of college he went to a GSA meeting. He didn’t have much in common with anybody, but he was a friendly sort of guy, so he vaguely got along with everyone, and he came back. He went to some of the meetings, when he wasn’t too swamped with homework or too lazy to get out of bed. He became generally friendly with most of the people in the group.

Late in the semester, they had an event for the Transgender Day of Remembrance. He didn’t have anywhere else to be, so he showed up, along with only four other people. There were candles – although not actual candles because those weren’t allowed on school property, but little flickering electric things. There was a video, played on a projector that took awkwardly long to start up, by a guy who identified themself as “genderqueer”. They talked about their own life, realizing they were genderqueer, coming out, and so forth, and then moved into talking about what Remembrance meant.

Foggy doesn’t really remember that part. He could barely see anything, his brain was running around on itself so quickly. Those things that the person in the video had talked about – he’d felt them, so many of them, and always assumed everyone did. But apparently that wasn’t normal. And all the things that, if he’d bothered to think about it, he would have assumed meant he couldn’t be transgender – dresses, and pink, and dolls – apparently they didn’t rule it out?

He walked back to his apartment in a bit of a daze. He found himself going back through his entire life, taking it apart piece by piece. With “transgender” as the picture on the box, a whole bunch of those pieces seemed to fit together a lot better now. By the time he finished the walk through the dimly lit campus, he was pretty sure he was genderqueer. He went on the internet as soon as he got up to his room. He searched, searched some more. Found forums and webrings. They were mostly targeted at trans women – basically all of them, really – but some of them had stuff for trans men, too. And there was a little bit about genderqueer people. But he read more, and more, and found out – wait, you can like dresses and stuff and be a man, not even something in between.

That all took months, though, all that reading and searching and researching. He thought about it all over the Christmas break. Didn’t let his parents know, because who knew what they would think. One thing that didn’t take months was knowing he wanted testosterone. He figured that out within days, even before he’d started to wonder if he might be a man, not genderqueer. As soon as he read what testosterone did, he knew, instantly, without even thinking about it or making any sort of decision, that that’s what he wanted. Needed.

He came back from Christmas break still working it all over in his brain to see how it fit. Chanted, in his head, “I’m a guy, I’m a guy, I’m a guy,” and it was amazing how good it felt. He started planning – okay, if I am a man, just for the sake of argument, what would I do? He knew he wanted testosterone, unquestioningly. He thought about surgery. A lot. (But what if I’m not transgender? I’m not like the others. What if I’m lying to myself? What if I’m just trying to be different? What if I actually just hate women? What if?) He planned how to come out to his parents, as a hypothetical, if he decided he were transgender this is what he would do, and he found himself gradually drifting towards that without even meaning to.

He cut his hair, and he kind of missed it but the first time someone said “sir” at a checkout counter it was the best thing he’d ever felt. He got new clothes that fit his body differently – he was all curves, his mother had commented on it plenty, but with the right clothes he could make that just a little less visible. (It still felt like his hips were glaring tells to everyone who saw him.) But he found that it was, indeed, a matter of tells. That people seeing him as a man was the base state, and then “tells” made them see him wrong. He went from trying to hide his chest with clothes to getting a used binder off the internet. He didn’t tell his parents. He came back for summer, and they were shocked to see how different he looked, but he took off the binder (felt wrong every moment he had it off) and just told them he was going for a new look.

He found a psychologist just off-campus when he went back for his sophomore year. She didn’t know much about transgender people, but he did, by that point. He spent more of the time educating her than she did therapizing him but in six months he had The Letter. Testosterone was absurdly expensive (and he didn’t want to tell his parents anything) but the endocrinologist he found managed to convince the insurance company that he was taking it for hormonal imbalance and it should be covered and he could afford it, just barely.

It was like a whole new world. So many things he’d hated, shifting, not perfect but so, so much better. Facial hair and those damn curves moving to different places and the day his voice cracked for the first time he ended up sobbing in the bathroom because he couldn’t believe something so wonderful could really have happened to him.

He came back for the summer between his sophomore and junior years with facial hair and a deep voice – deeper, at least – and he still hadn’t ever quite gotten around to coming out to his parents. It was a mess. Slurs got tossed around – mostly innocently, people not realizing what they meant, but no less hurtful for that. His grandparents were beyond upset, horrified he’d changed his body like this for something that they were sure was a stage he would grow out of. His parents were more bewildered than anything else.

But he was there, he’d done it, he was transitioning, it was final and there was nothing they could do. Fait accompli.

By the end of the summer, they’d worked to a point of balance. Foggy was still Foggy, so they didn’t have to change names, which made it easier. The change of pronouns was harder. “He” seemed like such an easy thing to say, but his family kept telling him how hard it was. But they were trying to restrain the more obviously offensive things they wanted to say, and they were trying to address him properly, and that was, honestly, more than he had ever hoped for.

By the end of his senior year, his voice was low, his pronouns felt normal, his teachers knew what to call him, and he was working on getting his legal name changed over to Franklin. He was applying to law schools, got into Harvard Law – which his mother insisted she wasn’t surprised by at all – and, as soon as his acceptance letter got to him, he started planning how to deal with the dorm problem.

The solution was better than anything he could have ever imagined.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I calculated out that Foggy should have been realizing he was trans in 2008, by my timeline (law school is generally three years, they finished that in 2015, then college was four years before that). I wanted to use TDoV, but they wouldn't have been celebrating that yet then (it started in 2009). TDoR was started in 1999, so it was reasonable that a GSA might be honoring it in 2008. Genderqueer was established as a term by 2002.  
> (Apparently Matt is somehow supposed to be at least 30 during the show? Because he was 9 when Stick left and then it was at least twenty years later that Stick came back? But that's weird and doesn't line up unless Matt took like a gap decade so we're not going with that.)


End file.
